


these scars are my own

by akamine_chan



Category: Bandom, Frank Iero and the Future Violents, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Band Break Up, Canon Compliant, Crossdressing, Gen, Gender Issues, Gender Roles, Post Band Break Up, photoshoot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-12 23:54:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20573024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akamine_chan/pseuds/akamine_chan
Summary: Frank's photoshoot goes in unexpected directions.





	these scars are my own

**Author's Note:**

  * For [were_duck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/were_duck/gifts).

> This is for were_duck and Sam (@neonviolent on Instagram) because they continuously inspire me.
> 
> Beta by Ande, makeup help from @qdpoisson on Twitter, title from Moto Pop.

"Okay, I think I've got everything I need."

"Super," Frank says, because he's dying in this fucking jacket. It's springtime, but already hot and humid, and the studio's air conditioning is struggling to keep up.

He can feel the sweat dampening his hairline and he can't wait to change back into his street clothes: thin tee shirt and ragged jeans with missing knees.

Mitch reaches into the fridge in the corner, the one that he'd gotten cold bottled water out of earlier. This time, though, he pulls out two beers, some fancy hipster brand that Frank doesn't recognize. "I promised you a reward," Mitch says.

"So you did."

Mitch pops the caps off and hands one to Frank. Frank takes a drink, and god, there's nothing like the taste of a cold beer on a hot day. Even if the beer is some sort of small-batch, artisan, made-under-the-light-of-the-full-moon hipster bullshit. He squints at the label. "It's not bad."

"Dude started a microbrewery over in Williamsburg. Got a place serving this shit on tap, with a little kitchen cooking up pretentious and over-priced bar food." Mitch shrugs. "He's a friend, though, so I try to support him however I can."

"To friends," Frank toasts, and takes another swig before setting the beer down on top of the fridge. "'M gonna get changed, I'm dying in this," he says, plucking at the collar of the jacket, and goes into the dressing room.

It's a step up from Mitch's old studio, the one he'd shared with two other photographers, where the dressing area had been nothing more than a sheet pinned to a clothesline. That was years ago, though, and they've both come a long way since then.

Frank has to admit that this dressing room is pretty sweet: a big floor-to-ceiling mirror and a professional looking makeup vanity. There was also a medium sized dresser that Frank suspected contained more clothes and possibly some props. Along the back was a built-in rack holding an array of outfits.

Mitch did a lot of work with musicians, mostly bearded alt-rock, hardcore, and punk dudes, shooting album covers and promo pictures. The wardrobe reflects that, all flannel shirts, dark skinny jeans, fleece-lined jackets, and several pairs of boots.

If Frank hadn't brought along his own outfits, he wouldn't have had much difficulty in picking out something to wear. He flicks through the clothes, stopping to look more closely at a tee shirt for a band Frank has never heard of.

Judging by the art on their merch, variations on the theme of flaming skeletons and pierced hearts, it is definitely a band Frank should check out.

The other end of the rack has a small selection of more feminine clothing, v-neck shirts and slacks, skirts and dresses. Most are dark, greys and blacks, but there are a few pieces in jewel tones. And—

"Jesus, Mitch, you steal this dress from your grandma's closet?" It definitely looks like something Frank would have found in _his_ nonna's closet, a simple summer dress, sleeveless, black with big white daisies on it. It has a v-neck and a nipped-in waist. It is ugly as fuck and Frank is weirdly taken by it.

"Which dress?" Mitch asks through the door.

"This one." Frank opens the door with the dress held up in front of him. "I'm pretty sure you mugged an old lady for this one."

"Nah, I found that one in the trash behind the Goodwill." Mitch squints at him. "You'd make a very…butch lady, Iero."

"When I was a kid, I always got called a queer because I was scrawny and short. Now you think I'm too butch to look good in a dress." He chuckles at the irony. "I think I could pull it off."

Shrugging, Mitch looks him over with a critical eye. "I can make anyone look good, no matter what they're wearing."

_That_ sounds like a dare to Frank, and he has never, ever stepped back from a dare. Jamia always calls him a ballsy fucker and swears it's one of his worst character flaws. Frank disagrees. "Challenge accepted, Wojcik," he says, shutting the door in Mitch's face.

"Help yourself to anything in the dresser," Mitch says through the door. "Do you need help with makeup?"

Frank bursts out laughing. He'd taught himself how to apply eyeliner in self-defense; he'd been a scene kid, after all. And once he'd joined My Chem, Gerard's insistence on a unified visual aesthetic ensured that he'd learned much more than just the basics of applying makeup. "No, I think I got this covered, man. Thanks."

There's a slightly offended silence, and then, "Oh, yeah. I forgot."

And wasn't _that_ a weird feeling, moving out from under My Chem's shadow a little bit. He has no regrets about the years he'd put into the band, absolutely none, and he is proud of what they'd created, but sometimes it's nice just to be _Frank Iero_, rather than _Frank Iero, former guitarist from My Chemical Romance_.

If nothing else, there is a lot less baggage when he is just _Frank Iero_.

Or, at least, a different sort of baggage.

"No worries. It's been a while," he says. And his brain skips a beat, because it's been more than five years since they killed My Chem. Where the fuck did the time go?

"Yell if you need anything, dude," Mitch says.

"Yeah, thanks," Frank says absently.

He pulls off the denim jacket he was wearing for the last set of photos, folds it and puts it back into his backpack. His button down shirt follows, and he kicks off his Vans, peels off his socks, undoes his belt and lets his slacks hit the floor. He's standing in nothing but his skivvies and his tattoos, shivering as the sweat dries on his skin.

His reflection stares back at him, chin lifted a little in challenge. He's lost weight, he always does when he's on tour, even though he's made a sort of peace with his digestive system and tries to eat better. And in spite of the weight loss, he still has these stupid love handles. He pinches the flab between his fingers and scowls at his image. 

Jamia never says anything, but he knows she frets about how skinny he gets when he's on the road. He wishes she wouldn't; he's not gonna starve to death anytime soon, and he hates the fact that it's his fault that she worries.

He turns away because he's tired of looking at himself.

Frank eases the dress off the hanger, and it's simple to pull it over his head and let it settle around him. No zipping required. It's tight across the shoulders, because he's much broader than most grandmas, but he fits into the rest of the dress without any problems.

It's not designed to flatter his body type, which is square and straight, no curves in sight, but he's not entirely sure the dress is flattering to _anyone's_ shape.

But it's okay, he's sure he can make this work to his advantage.

Frank wasn't wrong about the dresser; it's filled with accessories. A couple of bras, some men's socks, unopened packages of stockings or maybe tights; Frank's never been able to tell the difference in spite of dressing two little girls for a number of years. He taps at one of the packages with a thoughtful finger. He's pretty sure he'll fit into the extra large pair.

The next drawer contains an assortment of odds and ends: a colorful scarf, some ties and belts, and a couple of inexpensive-looking wigs, one curly platinum blonde, one brassy red.

The last drawer has only a few props: two candles and a string of Christmas lights, a small chalkborad with FUCK OFF scrawled in purple chalk, partly smudged. There's also a beat-up paper crown from Burger King, an opened bag of glowsticks, and for some reason, a small plush sheep.

Mitch is more inclined to use a unique backdrop and interesting lighting in his portraits, so it's not a surprise that he doesn't have a lot of physical props.

Frank pushes the drawer back in, and slides the middle one open again, strangely drawn to the wigs. His fingers card carefully through the artificial hair.

They weren't like dollar store cheap wigs, but they weren't anywhere near the professional level ones he's run across in his brief forays into the film business.

He's not sure he wants to put _that_ much effort into this, it's just him and Mitch drinking some beer and fucking around. He figured the dress, the tights, some eyeliner, maybe a touch of eyeshadow in Gerard's honor…

Go big or go home. That's been his motto since he was a kid, and it's worked out reasonably well for him over the years. He really can't complain.

All in.

He's very tempted by the red wig, but he knows it won't look good with his skin tone, so he picks up the blonde one.

They always say that blondes have more fun.

Frank sits down at the vanity and opens the package of tights. _Foxy's Opaque Black Tights, XL_. He hadn't realized before they had Cherry and Lily that tights were a pretty common component of a young girl's wardrobe. He's had a lot of experience dressing the girls when they were smaller and less independent, and he's got this part down pat.

He scrunches together the material for one leg, gathering it up to make it easier to pull it over his foot. He keeps his toes curled and gets the material up to his calf before switching over to the other leg, and then standing up.

Foot to calf, calf to knees, knees to mid-thigh, under the dress and up over his ratty shorts, alternating sides. The tights feel weird against his hairy legs, a little ticklish and a little shivery; Frank tries not to think about how it seems like there's something's crawling on him.

He shudders, and rubs at his legs briskly, trying to chase away the feeling. Looking critically at the tights, Frank realizes that opaque doesn't mean what he thought it meant. He can clearly see the tattoos that decorate his legs. He's pretty sure it's not going to matter; Mitch is probably not going to be taking full-body shots of him.

Back at the vanity, Frank examines his face, turning one way, then the other. It's perfectly serviceable. And in spite of all the teasing he gets about never aging, he doesn't look fifteen anymore.

He still gets carded _all the time_, though, and the kids give him shit for it, asking him if he's _really_ a grown up.

Frank tries to imagine what people see when they look at him, if they managed to see past the tattoos. A normal guy with a pointy chin and an okay nose, nothing to write home about. He's got some scars, but not as many as you'd expect from the way he throws himself around on stage.

His shoulder twinges and he grimaces; not all of his scars are on the outside.

Jamia calls him her pretty boy, calls him beautiful, and he doesn't get that. Doesn't _see_ that. She's the beauty in the family, and he's so grateful that the kids look more like her.

Frank grabs his phone and pokes at the buttons to pull up his camera app. He screws his face up, crosses his eyes and sticks out his tongue, and takes a selfie. He laughs softly at his ridiculousness and texts the photo to Jamia.

He sets the phone aside and looks at himself in the mirror again, ready to get down to business.

The vanity has a bunch of drawers, and when he opens one, he finds it filled with a hodgepodge of makeup _things_; he doesn't know what they're called, the little plastic clamshell cases that blush and powder and eyeshadow comes in.

He pokes around, picking out some colors that interest him and—

"Jesus fucking Christ!" he yelps, jerking backward and reaching for something, _anything_ to smash the giant spider hiding under some pastel blue eyeshadow, its long, spider-y legs peeking out. He hits the vanity hard with his knee as he scrambles back, and everything in the drawer jumps and slides around—

Oh, fuck. It's not a spider, thank God. It's a stupid set of fake eyelashes pretending to be an eight legged creep and Frank scowls at it.

There's a concerned knock at the door. "Frank? You okay?" Mitch sounds worried.

Frank takes a deep breath, trying to calm down his racing heart. "Yeah, just a case of mistaken identity."

There's a long pause. "…Okay," Mitch says.

Frank bites back a giggle. "I'm fine, dude." He pokes at the eyelashes with a finger, trying to suss out how they work.

He finds a package that the lone set of eyelashes escaped from, the label reads _Flirty Luxe Faux Mink, 5-pack_, and there's a tiny tube of what is probably glue and a weirdly bent set of tweezers. Frank's not entirely sure he's up to the challenge of fake eyelashes, but he's determined to give it a shot.

He sets the package of eyelashes on top of the vanity, and goes digging through the drawer for colors that appeal to his admittedly inexperienced eye.

There's a peachy-orange set of eyeshadows that Frank likes, and a powder that claims to be translucent. There's a selection of lip _things_ (too many: lipstick, lip stain, lip gloss, lip crayon, lip liner; what the hell is the difference?), and he's drawn to something bright and pink.

He looks for a plain old eyeliner pencil, but all he can find are liquid eyeliners with impossibly tiny brushes. It's been years, but eyeliner pencils are something he knows how to handle. He's not so sure about the liquid liners, they seem to be beyond his skills. Finally he finds a stub of a pencil in the back corner of the bottom drawer.

The pencil is old; the eyeliner is hard and crumbly, and resistant to being applied. Frank tries, hands steady, but he ends up with a barely visible line on one eye. He ends up poking himself in the other eye, and what little liner he got on gets washed away. He concedes defeat, eye still watering. "Fuck it."

He grabs the package of fake eyelashes. On the back, there are 'simple' instructions for successful application and to be honest, it doesn't look that hard. Apply the glue to the eyelash, place the eyelash where you want it to go, wait for the glue to dry.

Frank uses the tweezers to pick up the eyelashes. He can see a thin strip of material where all the lashes are attached to; if he puts the glue on the opposite side of that strip then the lashes will be orientated in the right way.

He's pretty proud of figuring that out for himself.

It's unexpectedly hard. The glue slides around, making it almost impossible for the lashes to stay where he wants them, and they end up stuck way above his lash line. He peels them off, wincing a little at the pull, and tries again. And again.

He finally manages to get them pretty close to where he wanted them, but he's not sure it was worth the effort. They make his eyes look bigger, sure, but when he blinks, the lashes _move_ and the feeling is weird and sorta creepy. He's not sure he likes it.

Frank remembers that Jamia has bitched over the years about shaving her legs and putting on makeup, complaining bitterly about the performative femininity that women have to do and he thinks, _huh_.

It makes him very, very glad that he's not a woman, because he doesn't think he's very good at this. Plus, he likes having a dick. "I like having a dick," he yells at Mitch, his voice echoing against the high ceilings.

"Me, too," Mitch yells back without missing a beat. "You almost done in there?"

Frank grins at himself in the mirror. "Yeah, just about."

He applies just a hint of the eyeshadow, powders his face enough to get rid of the shine, and contorts his mouth to apply the lip stuff. He blots the excess color from his lips and nods, satisfied.

He picks up the wig and gives it a gentle shake, trying to untangle the curls a little. Thankfully his own hair is pretty short, so the wig slips right on with no problem. Some of his dark hair is visible at the edges, and he tucks it in as best as he can with the pointy end of a comb. It's not perfect, but it works.

He goes back to the clothes rack and picks out a pair of boots, the ones that are the most beat-up. Battered and scuffed, they look like they've seen some shit. They're a little too big, but it's not like he's going to actually walk in them. He loosens the laces and shoves his feet in.

He stands and moves in front of the full length mirror, taking in the whole effect.

In spite of putting on the trappings of traditional femininity, he doesn't look like a woman. He doesn't even look like a man trying to pass as a woman. He's just a tattooed guy wearing an exceptionally ugly dress.

He thought it would _feel_ different, somehow. Like wearing a dress would change the way some internal mechanism worked. He sighs, because he suddenly remembers Gerard talking about his experience wearing a dress when he'd been in college.

"It changed the way people looked at me," Gerard had earnestly explained. "The fucking way they treated me, and viewed me." He'd chewed at a ragged thumbnail. "It was an interesting experiment, and I got to experience some of the bullshit that women have to put up with on a regular basis."

Frank is starting to understand what Gerard had been saying on a more not-theoretical level.

But there is a big difference between Gerard and himself. Gerard is a pretty guy and Frank has no doubt that he'd made a pretty woman. Nobody had probably even noticed that he'd been a guy in a dress.

Frank tries to imagine walking around the city like this, wearing his ugly dress. Maybe catching a cab or riding the subway, just minding his own business. How long before some toxic asshole decides that Frank's not following the unwritten rules of being a man (or a woman, for that matter) and tries to 'correct' Frank with the liberal application of violence, verbal or otherwise?

The world is a shitty place; Frank's known that since he was a teenager getting shoved around by the jocks in high school. But he hadn't really understood how bad it could be for people who didn't conform to strict gender roles until he'd gone on tour with Against Me!

Some of the things Laura had told him had given him nightmares for months afterwards. And the worst part is that for him, it stays a bad dream. For people like Laura, it's a reality that they can't escape.

"Shit," he mutters, because something that started out as a stupid joke has suddenly become so much more.

He meets his own eyes in the mirror and his chin goes up automatically. "Fuck 'em." He grabs his smokes and clomps out the door.

Mitch has set a stool in front of his plain canvas backdrop, with some big reflectors on tripods. There's a lot of natural light in the studio from the big windows, but Frank suspects that Mitch is trying for something a little softer. 

Frank perches on the stool, hooking the heel of a boot on one of the rungs. He lights a cigarette, inhales, and looks directly into the camera lens that Mitch is aiming at him.

"Jesus, Iero, you're the most Jersey thing I've ever seen in my life."

"You know it, baby." He shoves the pack of smokes into the top of his boot and blows a stream of smoke out the side of his mouth.

Mitch shakes his head. He opens one of the windows a crack and turns on a fan to help dissipate the smoke. "You know they banned indoor smoking, yeah?"

"They can fucking ticket me," Frank growls.

Mitch grins and laughs.

After that, it's like any other photoshoot. They idly chat while Mitch takes pictures, glancing down at the camera viewscreen occasionally.

"I quit, you know," Frank says, looking at the butt of his cigarette. He walks over to the coffee can by the window that's clearly been used as an ashtray and drops the butt in.

"What made you start back up?" Mitch asks, following Frank with the camera.

"I got run over by a bus."

Mitch winces. "I think smoking again after a near-death experience is a totally understandable reaction."

"I'm still trying to quit, but I haven't managed to make it stick." The very idea of quitting makes his low-level background anxiety spike; his mouth dries up and his chest feels tight. He settles back onto the stool and clears his throat. "Jersey has these community programs for quitting smoking, y'know? Support groups, discounts on nicotine patches, stop smoking hotline, lots of pamphlets, the whole nine yards."

Mitch nods. "New York has a program, too. I've seen the ads on tv."

Frank rolls his shoulders and shakes out his arms. "So, anyway, one night after dinner the kids say they have something to show me. The whole family troops into the den, and I see my wife's laptop is hooked up to the big tv. And I'm kinda freaked out, because the kids are very serious and solemn, no giggles, no smiles. They sit me down on the couch, lower the lights and. . ."

Mitch stops taking pictures, wholly focused on the story Frank's telling. "…And?"

Frank can't help the snort of laughter. "…And proceed to do a PowerPoint presentation on the benefits of quitting smoking, including _51 Reasons That Smoking Is Bad for You_. The girls got all the info together and created the slides, while Miles found all the gross pictures of lungs for the _51 Reasons_. Jamia swears up and down that she didn't help them at all, but I don't belive her," he says darkly.

Mitch looks gobsmacked. "Oh my fucking god."

"I know!" Frank crows. He remembers the weird mix of pride and mortification he'd felt as he'd sat through the presentation. He hadn't dared to look in Jamia's direction because he _knew_ she was smirking and he would have fucking lost it. 

"That's crazy," Mitch says. He takes another burst of shots before carefully replacing the lens cap. "Come into my 'office' and let's see what we've got."

Mitch's 'office' is a beat-up behemoth of a desk pushed into the corner of the loft. Most of the surface is taken up by a huge Power Mac and the largest monitor Frank has ever seen. "Nice." It reminds him a lot of the computer setup that Ray has in his studio back in California.

Mitch pats the metallic case almost affectionately. He pulls out a cable and attaches the camera to it. "Pull up a chair; this'll take a minute."

Frank sits down and watches, fascinated, as the images flash briefly on the screen, downloading from camera to computer. He's been playing around with photography, both digital and physical, for years now, and this is still a magical moment to him, seeing the pictures for the first time, almost like watching a physical image develop in a chemical bath. "Which program do you use?"

They chat about photo editing software while the computer whirrs softly. There's photos from other sessions on the camera, and it takes a while to download them all, even with Mitch's high-end computer.

Finally, the editing software opens. There's a lot of photos of Frank in his dress, moments frozen in time. Pictures of him caught mid-laughter, smiling wide, looking serious, chin up, eyes closed, hair flying as he'd tried a hair-flip.

He usually hates seeing at pictures of himself, but he can't look away from these. The pictures should be awful; he's wearing the world's ugliest dress, which shows off a shit-ton of his tattoos, but doesn't flatter his coloring at all. His wig is crooked, and one of his fake eyelashes is trying to abandon ship.

"There's some great shots here," Mitch murmurs. He clicks one to enlarge it. "I think this is my favorite."

Frank is stupidly charmed by the image of himself blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth and looking at the camera dead on. "I like it." It radiates a rough and tumble, 'don't fuck with me' vibe that Frank loves.

"It really reminds me of those shots of Iggy Pop wearing an evening dress, have you seen them?"

Frank shakes his head.

"It was from some advertising campaign, and he's wearing this sleeveless dress that's got a plunging neckline. In one of them, he's got a designer purse hanging off his arm and he's just standing there with his bare chest and hairy arms and legs and the look in his eyes is just pure Iggy. Punk to the core. No retreat, no surrender."

Mitch opens up a browser and quickly finds the pictures he's talking about.

"Huh," Frank says, rolling his chair closer for a better look. It really is an amazing picture, and he totally gets what Mitch is saying. There's a couple of other shots from the same photoshoot, Iggy leaping, Iggy standing hip-shot with the purse tucked under his arm. Iggy doesn't look anything less than himself in a dress. "He's a legend."

"That he is." Mitch goes back to Frank's pictures. "I can edit and crop some of these and upload them for you." He slants a glance at Frank. "I assume these aren't for public consumption."

Frank opens his mouth to agree and…stops. He studies the pictures. It's just him, wearing a particularly ugly piece of clothing. It doesn't say anything about him, other than he has terrible taste in dresses. It doesn't make him gay, it doesn't make him weak, it changes absolutely nothing about him.

He thinks about his kids, growing up in a world infinitely more complex than the one he'd grown up in. Cherry and Lily gleefully painting his fingernails and putting makeup on Miles. He remembers late-night conversations on the bus with Laura, long after the show sweat had dried, about how desperately she'd struggled with what it meant to be a man. And later, what it meant to be a woman.

There's a run in his tights; it starts at his knee and goes down. He can clearly see the lines and colors of the tattoo under the fabric. He traces over the run with a finger, and thinks about all the kids that come to his shows, looking for safety and acceptance and understanding. "You know," he says slowly, "maybe they don't have to stay private.

"You sure?" Mitch asks. "Your fans can be…intense."

Something that feels like certainty settles over Frank. "Yeah. Yeah, let's do it." He points at the monitor. "I'm gonna need a print of the Jersey one, though."

Mitch just laughs.

-fin-

**Author's Note:**

> In 2012 I wrote a [fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/414398) about Frank putting on a dress and looking at himself in a mirror and thinking about what it means to be a man.
> 
> Fast forward to June 2019 and these photo of Frank in a dress surface. At first, I was pretty sure they were just another PhotoShop deal, like that pic of Mikey in fishnets. Well, it turned out they were real, and I'm **still** trying to process that, months later.
> 
> When I linked were_duck to the pics, their response was "I WAS NOT PREPARED FOR THE FULL JERSEY EFFECT OF THIS" which is really an excellent summation of the whole situation.
> 
> @neonviolent has also done [some doodles](https://www.instagram.com/p/BzQvYVtgDRo/) of Frank in his dress - you should check 'em out for sure.


End file.
